Head of Quality Assurance (QA) - London - Remote in Slough

Join a leading Asset Management Data Solutions provider as Head of QA, where you'll architect and lead our quality strategy in a fully remote capacity. In this pivotal role, you'll build and mentor a distributed QA team while driving excellence across our data platform and solutions that power critical investment decisions for asset managers worldwide.

As Head of QA, you'll be the guardian of quality for our sophisticated data solutions, establishing comprehensive QA frameworks that encompass both functional precision and non-functional excellence. You'll design and implement cutting-edge testing strategies, automated tooling, and rigorous processes that ensure our platform delivers accurate, timely, and reliable financial data at scale.

Key Responsibilities:

• Strategic Leadership: Provide visionary leadership to the QA team, fostering a culture of quality, collaboration, and continuous improvement across a diverse team located both on- and off-shore. Partner with key stakeholders like the Heads of Engineering, Cloud, Professional Services and Customer Services to ensure QA strategy aligns with all of the wider business goals. Drive adoption of best practices in test automation, CI/CD, and Agile testing methodologies, focusing heavily on implementing fully automated testing of all releases.
• Technical Excellence: Offer technical guidance and hands-on expertise in QA practices, ensuring adherence to industry standards and best practices. Lead the engineering of a Test Automation Framework, ensuring the development and maintenance of automated tests to support continuous integration and delivery processes. Oversee the creation and execution of Volumetric and Performance Test frameworks to ensure the system’s ability to handle large volumes of data and its performance under different loads. Innovate and explore emerging technologies and techniques to enhance test coverage, effectiveness, and efficiency.
• Process Improvement: Implement and refine QA processes, optimising testing practices and minimising bugs and operational defects. Embrace the ‘Fail Fast’ principle, encouraging the team to quickly identify issues and failures in the development process to allow for immediate correction and learning. Continual improvement to assist with the stability and scalability of client release processes to ensure client confidence in change going into their environments. Promote 'Pair Development' where Software Engineers and QAs work together from the early stages of development; evangelising a culture of shared responsibility for quality. Establish and track QA metrics to measure team performance, product quality, and value delivery. Ensure metrics are clear, actionable, and visible across the business. Proactively seek new QA methods that unlock our time to value and the enablement of fast feedback loops.
• Tooling and Infrastructure: Manage QA tools, maintaining their effectiveness and alignment with organisational needs. Identify and address tooling gaps, making recommendations for enhancements. Ensure test environments and data meet the needs of QA activities of both the present and long-term future.
• Collaboration and Support: Strong communicator able to align teams and expectations while getting the best out of small teams. Collaborate with cross-functional teams, including Product, Delivery and Engineering to ensure seamless and impactful software deliveries with minimal disruption to live users. Work closely with the Head of Engineering to align QA initiatives with overall engineering goals. Own the use of release-note, documentation, backlog, and software libraries – through use of tools such as Jira, Confluence, etc. Provide adequate test environments, data, and support for team initiatives. Develop a culture focused on product quality and shared ownership.
• Team Development and Management: Undertake a leadership role in team management, overseeing recruitment, onboarding, performance evaluation, and fostering a high level of engagement and development within the team. Set clear goals and provide coaching to optimize individual and team performance. Cultivate high engagement, innovation, and collaboration within the team.

Key Performance Measures:

• Test coverage, scope, speed, and effectiveness
• Test automation coverage and reliability
• Test Frequency and Speed - How fast can they be ran and how often
• Test Portability - Non-prod envs, dev envs, dev machines
• Cycle time from code commit to production deployment
• Release quality (defect escape rate, hotfixes, user sentiment)
• QA process maturity and compliance
• Timeliness and visibility of QA reporting
• Adoption of CI/CD and Agile testing practices
• Level of environment parity across lower environments
• QA team engagement, capabilities, and velocity
• Percentage of team member’s personal objectives achieved
• Engagement of team including understanding and adherence to policies, procedures, and guiderails
• Positive feedback from internal stakeholders, observed behaviours and input at meetings
• Demonstration of company values through working approach and output